To the Valley Below

PART OF THE Dylan legend is the promise that one day we will finally know the "real" Dylan. The promotion department at Columbia Records plays on this promise with the release of every new record--the hype for Blood on the Tracks went something like this: "You've heard the folk Dylan; you've heard the rock 'n' roll Dylan; you've heard the country Dylan; here, at last, is the real Dylan."

Dylan himself doesn't seem to mind playing the game. As his songs become less an expression of personal bitterness, a la Positively 4th Street, he appears to become more and more conscious of the distinction between himself and his persona--like Proust who, when he saw his readers approaching the early volumes of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu as a roman a clef, had his narrator relate an internal monologue in which he addresses himself as Marcel, then hastens to add, in parentheses, "if indeed the narrator of this novel can be called Marcel."

This self-consciousness is reflected in Dylan's later protest songs. In Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll and Only a Pawn in Their Game, the word "I" never appeared. He assumed his audience's sensibilities to be the same as his own--he could lay out his story and leaves it at that. When he returned to protest, with The Ballad of George Jackson, he could no longer be so sure, and the song emphasized that these were his personal reactions to Jackson's murder:

Sometimes I think this whole world

Is one big prison yard,

Some of us are jailers

The rest of us are guards...

Rubin Carter explains on the first page of his autobiography, The Sixteenth Round, that his name, Hurricane, "provides an accurate description of the destructive forces that rage within my soul." The book as a whole reveals a man with a frightening potential for violence and vengeance--Judge Larner and the all-white jury that convicted him must hope in the interest of their own physical safety that Hurricane be kept behind bars. No mediating agent stands between Hurricane's sense of injustice and the outside world. When as a boy a white drunk tried to rape a member of his gang, Rubin responded by slashing the man's head open. When Hurricane was in custody and a cop called him "nigger," it was a reflex to smash the man's face in.

It's not surprising that Dylan should feel a certain kinship with Rubin. His own sense of justice is removed from the world of judges and legislation--Dylan bringing his fury to bear on a victim as in Like a Rolling Stone, must feel a bit like a flurry of Rubin's punches. When Dylan sings in the chorus "One time he could've been/The Champion of the World," he's talking about more than a boxing title; he's suggesting a state in which relationships between people are informed by an intuitive sense of justice, rather than by a systematic but easily perverted legal code. That Rubin's case means more to Dylan than a simple entanglement of a boxer with the law is emphasized by the way in which he is named: in narrative verses he is identified as "Rubin," or "Rubin Carter," while in the choruses he is "The Hurricane...," "This is the story of The Hurricane," and "That's the story of The Hurricane," and "That's the story of The Hurricane,"--Dylan has raised Rubin to mythical status.

The melodic structure of Hurricane is not very original; Dylan himself used this threatening pattern before, in All Along the Watchtower. But it's effective. Luther's congas charge through the chorus with the pace of horses' hoofbeats--the uninhibited power of Hurricane's vengeance. The verses are short, clipped--the insistent bullying of a Patterson cop extracting the cooperation of Arthur Dexter Bradley:

Remember that murder that happened in a bar?

Remember you said you saw the getaway car?

Think you'd like to play ball with the law?

Think it might've been that fighter that you saw,

Running, that night? Don't forget that you are white!

As has has ever since The Ballad of George Jackson, Dylan makes it clear that it is his own sense of justice that has been offended--the sense of justice of the, if you will, "real" Dylan.

How can the life of such a man

Be in the palm of some fool's hand?

To see him obviously framed

Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed

To live in a land where justice is a game.

Joey follows directly from the tradition of Dylan songs epitomized by John Wesley Harding: the title song, on first appearance, seems to be simply another tribute to the myth of the "outlaw-hero". A closer listening, though, reveals that all of the traditionally apothesized qualities of the outlaw have been either turned on their head--"he travelled with a gun in every hand", "with his lady by his side he took a stand" (what self-respecting outlaw would make his stand with his lady by his side?); or else cloaked in puzzling ambiguity--"he was never known to make a foolish move," "the situation there was all but straightened out."

The narrator of Joey is someone on the fringes of Gallo's circle, possibly a member of the New York theater crowd that turned him into a cultural hero even before he died. The narrator identifies himself twice, once recalling the one time he saw Joey, after his release from prison in '71.

He lost a little weight

But he looked like Jimmy Cagney

And I swear he did look great!

Appropriately enough, Gallo is identified in the narrator's mind with a movie idol, with the cinematic image of a mobster. The narrator appears next at Joey's funeral and declares piously

Someday if God's in heaven

Overlooking his preserve

I know the men who shot him down

Will get what they deserve

No personal "shame" here, as there was for Dylan himself in Hurricane, but only an abstract, movie-like notion of a heavenly father handing out just rewards and punishments.

The same inversions which dominated John Wesley Harding prevail in Joey. He goes out to seek revenge for an attempt on his brother's life, but when the opportunity actually arises, Joey says, "We're not those kind of men/It's peace and quiet that we need/To go back to work again." Which sounds quite romantic and pacifist, but in context is saying simply that mob warfare is a poor atmosphere in which to conduct the business of gambing and numbers-running. Upon his release from prison, "He tried to find a way back in/To the life he'd left behind," but this is not Frank Sinatra coming back to Brooklyn after the service, looking for his finance and his old crowd: Joey, Joey, what made them want to come and blow you away?" moan Dylan and Emmylou Harris in the chorus. Safe to assume it had something to do with the fact that he arranged for the assassination attempt on Joseph Columbo. Safe to assume too that Dylan knows that, in which case the chorus takes on a satirical quality.

Isis is reminiscent of Dylan's work on the John Wesley Harding album, particularly As I Went Out One Morning and The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest, songs about false searches. Isis begins with the narrator leaving Isis, the Egyptian goddess of perfect wife and motherhood for reasons left obscure. He goes through a ritual of cutting off his hair and washing his clothes and meets a man who promises him easy wealth. They travel to a country of "pyramids embedded in ice" and the narrator discovers that his companion is a grave-robber. His imagination is inflamed--he has visions of turquoise, gold, and diamonds. But the companion dies and instead of taking a body out of the pyramid, the narrator winds up throwing a body into it. There are no riches inside, and the only thing left for him to do is return to Isis--"just to tell her I love her."

But because of his false search, he finds himself strangely isolated from her. He finds her in a verse with echoes of Rimbaud's Season in Hell ("One evening I pulled Beauty down on my knees. I found her embittered and I cursed her.")

She was there, in the meadow, where the creek used to rise.

Blinded by sleet, and in need of a bed

I came in from the east, with the sun in my eyes

I cursed her one time, then I rode on ahead.

Their distance is accented in the next verse through the repeated use of the word said--in Dylan's songs, when anyone says anything, they tend to be concealing their true feelings. This is the dominant motif of Positively 4th Street (You say I let you down/You know it's not like that...You say you lost your faith/But that's not where it's at); Most Likely You Go Your Way, And I'll Go Mine (You say you love me and you're thinking of me/But you know you could be wrong...); and 4th Time Around. It recurs here in Isis, and, given the narrator's account of his adventures the result is an astonishingly banal conversation.

She said, "Where ya been?"

I said, "No place special."

She said, "You look different."

I said, "Well, I guess."

She said, "You been gone."

I said, "It's only natural."

She said, "You gonna stay?"

I said, "If you want me to, yes."

In the liner notes to the album, Allen Ginsberg describes Dylan's singing in One More Cup of Coffee as "Hebraic cantillation," and indeed as Dylan chants the first verse of the song, you can imagine him as a cantor in a local synagogue chanting the Song of Songs:

Your breath is sweet, your eyes are like

Two jewels in the sky

Your back is straight, your hair is smooth

On the pillow where you lie

But I don't sense affection, no gratitude or love

Your loyalty is not to me but to the stars above.

Here Dylan introduces the theme of the alienated lover in its most extreme form. Sensing that his lover is not on a plane where he can communicate directly to her, he can only describe her attributes. In the next two verses he elaborates a male and a female principle; he characterizes her father as overseeing "his kingdom, so no stranger does intrude," and one is reminded of one of the few pictures that exist of Sara Dylan, being sheparded through a crowd of photographers and reporters by her husband at the Isle of Wight.

You sister sees the future

Like your mama and yourself

You've never learned to read or write

There's no books upon your shelf And your pleasure knows no limits

Your voice is like a meadowlark

But your heart is like an ocean

Mysterious and dark...

Dylan continues to place women on pedestals, attributing to them a greater intimation of the mysteries of life and the future. His attitude has, however, undergone a subtle change. In the past he would write "She's got everything she needs/She's an artist/She don't look back," and then go on to title the song She Belongs to Me--an arrogance there, a confidence that despite all of woman's potential for communion with nature, in the final analysis she was his to possess. Things don't seem so certain anymore; womanhood appears to be too mysterious, too grand a thing for him to have or comprehend, and he can only ask for one more cup of coffee before he retreats "to the valley below."

Desire begins with a brief glimpse of the "real" Dylan, and so it ends, with Sara and the revelation that he wrote Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands for her. (Dylan will still play the game, though; Nat Hentoff reports that when Ginsberg asked Dylan for confirmation that the song was written for his wife, Dylan solemnly reminded him that Sara is the name of one of the Old Testament judges.) In the earlier song, as in One More Cup of Coffee, he could only approach her through her attributes--thus, the proliferation of possessives (your mercury mouth...your eyes like smoke...your voice like chimes, etc.). In addition, he ridiculed her other suitors as unworthy of her, and offered himself in their stead.

My warehouse eyes, my arabian drums

Should I leave them by your gate?

Or sad-eyed lady, should I wait?

Here, he said, are my visions, here are my songs--should I just leave them here for you, or will you take me, too? The assumption was, of course that she would.

After eleven years of marriage, he still senses distance between them, and Sara is an achingly desperate attempt to connect back up with her as a woman. He summons up memories of their children playing on the beach as babies, for it's through them that he feels closest to her, then memories of her, which remain only apparitions, with no history:

How did I meet you? I don't know

A messenger sent me in a tropical storm

You were there in the winter,

Moonlight on the snow,

And on Lily Pond Lane,

When the weather was warm.

Unable to penetrate her mystery, (So easy to look at/So hard to define) he can only, in true poet's fashion, give her names--"sweet virgin angel, sweet love of my life...scorpio sphinx in a calico dress...glamorous nymph with an arrow and bow"--and finally, simply, ask of her, "Don't ever leave me/Don't ever go."

With Desire, Dylan seems to be reaching out for a new audience; of his last three albums, it is easily the most listenable. Robbie Robertson's eerie guitar riffs on Planet Waves have been replaced by Scarlet Rivera's soothing, melodic violin line. Planet Waves was a depressing album--even Wedding Song which was cited by Newsweek as evidence of Dylan's new "mellowness" contained disturbing lines about love which "cut like a knife," about loving someone "more than madness." Blood on the Tracks was a transition, containing some of the bitterness of Planet Waves, but, particularly with Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, it pointed towards Desire. Now, no longer "preoccupied with his vengeance," he can concentrate on experimenting with a variety of song-forms--ballads like Black Diamond Bay, protest songs (Hurricane), satire (Joey), and Chants (One More Cup of Coffee). He even appears to be enough at peace with himself to, as in Sara, reveal the "real" Dylan.